Norfolk Southern has been in the news for all the wrong reasons, as multiple accidents have occurred due to the railroad assets crashing. As a result, various regulatory bodies have been looking into the company’s safety culture, hoping to find out the reason for these mishaps, so that they can be mitigated in the future. In fact, Norfolk Southern’s practices are a prime focus of federal regulators after a spate of major accidents since December 2021, three of which resulted in fatalities. Its derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 3, which released toxic chemicals, has spurred lawsuits from residents, business owners, and the state alleging negligence.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which typically investigates major transportation and hazardous-materials accidents, opened a special probe into Norfolk Southern’s safety culture, a move it hadn’t made in years. The Federal Railroad Administration separately has opened a safety probe into Norfolk Southern.

At the center of Norfolk Southern’s practices— and those of most other big railroads today— is a management system called precision-scheduled railroading, or PSR, designed to improve service, make operations more efficient, and cut costs. The industry impact since large US freight railroads started adopting PSR about six years ago has been similar to that of lean manufacturing on factories decades earlier. The changes helped Norfolk Southern squeeze more revenue out of each ton of freight it moved. 

While statistics don’t show a clear link between the implementation of PSR and changes in accident rates, the system introduced new hazards and additional risks. Derailments, the most common kind of accident, have fallen by more than half at major freight railroads since 2000, federal data show. Norfolk Southern, which adopted the PSR system in 2019, reported fewer derailments in 2022 than in any other year in the past decade. But their overall accident rate— counting collisions and other types of mishaps in addition to derailments— climbed 25% from 2019 to 2022.

Norfolk Southern isn’t an outlier in the safety issues it is facing. Other large freight railroads have also dealt with service disruptions after overhauling operations to adopt precision scheduling. Some problems stem from rail-yard congestion as employees handle longer trains and workers sometimes must do work they have little training for, all under tighter time pressure. Essentially, in a bid to improve operations, have more cars on the road, and increase revenues, Norfolk Southern and other railroads seem to be facing new problems, and need to find a way to deal with these, by perhaps taking a deep look at their people culture and policies.